Qualcomm overtakes Intel in market capitalization

LONDON – Qualcomm's standing as the leading supplier of application processors for mobile devices – and the fact that it is fabless – has boosted its market capitalization past Intel Corp., the world's largest chip maker.

San Diego-based Qualcomm is expected to increase its sales by 30 percent in 2012, according to market researcher IC Insights. Qualcomm's annual chips sales are expected to reach about $12.8 billion in annual chip sales, moving it three spots in the researchers' rankings to No. 4.

Although Intel (Santa Clara, Calif.) remains the No. 1 chip maker as measured by sales volume, its standing relies on its dominant position in PCs, a market that is now perceived to be flat at best as consumers embrace smartphones and tablet computers.

Those mobile devices are often powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon processors.

In the eyes of investors who have driven up its market capitalization, the fact that Qualcomm is a fabless company relieves it of the burden of having to invest billions of dollars each year in process development and wafer fabs.

As a result, Qualcomm's share price stands at $61.83, giving it a current market capitalization of $105 billion. Intel's market capitalization stands at $104 billion based on a share price of $20.96.

According to IC Insights, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.'s market cap is about $84 billion, followed by Texas Instruments at about $33 billion. Micron Technologies is valued at $5.75 billion and STMicroelectronics at $4.9 billion. ST's value is about half that of processor IP licensor ARM Holdings.

I believe that the stock market is currently undervaluing Intel and overvaluing Qualcomm. Intel's price to earnings to growth ratio (5 years) is about 0.84 whereas Qualcomm is about 1.12. Given today's stock prices I would put more of my money in the Intel basket than with Qualcomm.

Market understands Intel's product roadmap troubles. Qualcomm larger market value might be correct.
Intel killing itself with pursuit of Moore's Law for no business advantage. I can confirm (ex-mobile designer) 14nm is late, not working. 1272/14nm design shuttle tape outs all pushed out due to problems with process.
14nm has many issues and seriously now SOI being possible fix.
At this stage design teams have unstable 0.1 silicon models. No meaningful Baseband processor design can be started based on current state of 14nm.

Intel seems to have delayed 14 nm due to business reasons, first time I've heard this excuse, wouldnt have thought from Intel.
http://www.electronicsweekly.com/Articles/09/11/2012/54972/intel-cuts-training-delays-14nm-raises-fears-for-ireland.htm

Mr. Resistion,
I hear Intel's engineering team came clean and concluded current approach to 14nm would not work after spending $2B.
Plan was to ship 14nm parts in 2013 and now that plan has been scrapped. 0% chance of shipping a single 14nm chip in 2013.
On top of that Intel marketing this year was claiming 22nm was not competitive in market but "just wait until 14nm".
Intel now plans to to ship LTE chips fabricated at TSMC for next 2 years. However, TSMC is business smart. It is not going to give Intel a good wafer price over its long term customers like Qualcomm that buys many more chips in the chipset (wifi, LTE, RF and SOCs chips) unlike Intel LTE with Atom fabricated by an Intel internal fab.

Calling a delayed 14nm "12nm" is genius.
The foundry naming 14/16nm (i.e. which uses 20SOC 64nm metal pitch) shows how bankrupt the industry is on advancing moores laws.
none (as opposed to their public position)are going to volume production at 14/16nm with no die size reduction and die cost increase.

AMD have decided that they are going to leave the Semi-conductor market because they know that they can't make competitive products anymore and that Kaveri is a woeful failure and are embarrassed by the conduct of their fanboys.
AMD bankrupt Q1 2014